Roxy’s changing face saved me from Botox

Roxy Jacenko, who appeared on Channel Seven’s Sunday Night last week, has undergone a physical transformation that has inspired Annette Sharp to leave that wrinkle alone.

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BOTOX, I hear you calling — enticing me, persuading me when I peer into the mirror. Your promise is a more youthful appearance, a few more years of wrinkle-free living, maybe a “transforming” brow-lift into the bargain, possibly a solution to that annoying jowl sag and definitely a remedy, albeit temporary, to that permanent line that has settled between my brows.

“Don’t you want to look as young as your contemporaries, Nicole Kidman and Kylie Minogue?” Botox whispers to me, usually in the morning, when I’m applying make up before going to work.

Roxy Jacenko. Photo: Instagram

Yes, of course I do and in truth I had promised myself “a sprinkle”, as the experts call it, when I reached my 50th year, which is now nearly at an end.

Yet Botox and I have remained strangers this year and there’s now a good chance the muscle paralysing cosmetic serum that has preserved the careers of tens of thousands of women and men — actors, singers, newsreaders, dancers, airline stewards, real estate agents, models, marketers, television presenters, Shane Warne (though he denies it …) — and I will remain strangers in my 51st year too.

If so, I may have to send Roxy Jacenko flowers — to thank her.

It was PR boss Jacenko’s appearance on Channel 7’s Sunday Night show during the week that confirmed there are things far worse than ageing naturally.

Things worse than a wrinkle between your brows.

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Roxy at 38 is, I’m sure, almost the glittery blonde bombshell she fantasised about becoming when she was just a skinny, flat-chested girl with a turned eye, crooked teeth and a proud nose living in luxury in Woollahra, the daughter of wealthy ragtraders.

Back in about 2004, when I met her for the first time, she was a gutsy and determined PR girl, street-smart, hyperactive, absolutely driven and fun.

She was modestly attired, largely unadorned, had fine straight brown hair, a crooked smile and a more crooked nose.

And she was 100 per cent authentic.

If you met her, it would never occur to you that this was a woman who was unhappy in her own skin. She was absolutely unique, vibrant and very loveable.

Roxy in 2008.

But with success she flew in higher (and lower) social circles and soon started to transform herself — firstly into a punkish jeans-clad chick who might pass as Sass & Bide designer Sarah-Jane Clarke’s little sister, then next into a buxom coquet who could be mistaken for Lara Bingle’s Serbian cousin — and finally, more recently, into a woman who could, if you squinted, be Jesinta Franklin’s shorter Russian double.

Almost everything you could see and touch of Roxy has changed — and then changed again.

Repeated cosmetic procedures have almost erased all trace of the Roxy I once knew, liked
and admired.

Looking at her on television last week, I found myself wondering where all this transformation is headed.

When will she finally be able to look in the mirror and not hear the whisper of the Botox needle, the sting of the lip filler, and taste the chemical of the tooth whitener?

Will she ever know that peace? I seriously doubt it.

Jacenko and Curtis on Sunday Night.

And so I have decided, for now at least, to try to accept my older self because what
Roxy, by example, makes abundantly clear — with each TV, print and Instagram appearance — is that the quest for physical perfection and youth, is a futile one.

It lasts for one frozen frame, no more.

It’s far easier and healthier to accept your natural self and grow old with friends of a similar vintage who will tell you that to them you remain beautiful, irrespective of wrinkles and jowls. (Friends, you know who you are).

I hope Roxy has at least one good friend in her phone who occasionally tells her that.

Twitter: @InSharprelief